Obama Camp Relying Heavily on Ground Effort

For this election, neighbor-to-neighbor outreach "is more important than in any recent one, because of, without mincing words, the race factor," he said. "Having white validators, people working these neighborhoods who live in those neighborhoods and are of those neighborhoods, who are saying, 'Get out and vote for this guy,' is really important."

After several decades in which campaigns spent mostly on television ads and direct mail, recognition in the power of person-to-person contact has increased over the past dozen years. Rove seized on this notion after the 2000 election, when strong Democratic turnout led by organized labor racked up a popular-vote edge for Democrat Al Gore. For Bush's reelection, he oversaw the construction of a network in key states such as Ohio made of evangelical Christians, gun-rights supporters and other activists, with a clear hierarchy and individual goals for recruitment and contacts.

By contrast, Democrats in 2004 relied on a hybrid turnout effort -- volunteers and staff mustered by Sen. John F. Kerry's campaign, plus paid canvassers and union members overseen by an outside group led by Rosenthal that was able to accept larger donations. The group helped Kerry win several key states, but had downsides: Its canvassers could not advocate explicitly for Kerry, and it could not coordinate efforts with the campaign.

There were other lessons from 2004: Kerry won the Iowa caucus after building an organization that was stronger than that of former Vermont governor Howard Dean, who relied on mostly younger supporters from out of state.

"The basic concept is not a new or revolutionary one," said Jon Carson, Obama's national field director. "Campaigns have always wanted to have a grass-roots, volunteer-driven effort. The two pieces that came together for us . . . was the sheer volume of the people who wanted to get involved and the technology making it easier than ever before to find us. It wasn't that Democrats didn't get it" in past campaigns. "It was that . . . they weren't able to make it work on this scale."

Though the Obama campaign is modeled after previous incarnations, it was shaped and reshaped during the long primary season, as the team adopted what worked and shed what didn't. The operation took months building a network of support in Iowa that paid off with a crucial caucus win, and its belief in that sort of organization hardened when it lost a week later in New Hampshire, where it had done less organizing.

A breakthrough came with the turn to the neighborhood teams. Ganz had been testing the model for the Sierra Club, and the campaign tried it in South Carolina, to great success, as team members held one another accountable and boosted morale.

The team structure also proved effective in California as a way to absorb the waves of volunteer interest building there. When it came time to organize for the general election, the Obama campaign applied the structure everywhere.

In training sessions for volunteers and organizers, Ganz offered instruction on how to recruit volunteers and persuade voters. The gist was that volunteers needed to motivate others by speaking about their experiences and reasons for supporting Obama -- their "story" -- instead of just parroting the candidate's biography or message.

As Ganz sees it, this is a "values-based" approach like that of the conservative movement, rallying around core beliefs instead of individual issues. "Democrats lost the language of moral commitment and became very wonky and policy-oriented. One of Obama's big breakthroughs was to bring values back into it -- Democratic values," Ganz said. "The Republicans have been eating our lunch on this for a long time."

Volunteers are encouraged to take more initiative than those in Rove's network to come up with their own ways to recruit others and approach voters. But they are hardly freelancers. Field organizers in their areas and those higher up the ranks closely track volunteers' contact with voters, which is entered into a central database, to make sure they are meeting weekly goals. Volunteers receive instructions on which basic message of the month to deliver, beyond the sharing of personal motivations, and on how to respond to questions about some of the false rumors about Obama's religion and patriotism.

"You have to have really good message discipline so that the whole organization down to the local level is echoing the central message, which for us now is all about the economy," said Jeff Blodgett, the Minnesota director. "It's decentralized, but that there's a control point around the message and around data and accountability."